Friendship and Communication are Sacred

We've known each other 40 years, give or take a hell of a long time. And one of the things I've always noticed is the paradox of friendship and spirituality. One would think that one's religious life, you go to church, but for you, friendship is holy ground. Communication, in some ways is your religion. It seems to me. I'd like to understand that about you more.

It does seem like friendship and friendliness and communication together is what creates the alchemy or what creates the sacred quality and the love of sharing the truth of our experience. Seems like it doesn't require any beliefs. It's just so unperformed, so just as it is. And the reason why it seems like a religion is because the whole thing is based on the reality of what's going on and the desire to hear each other's reality. And friendship is so often thought of as we do things together, we have fun, we go to events, and of course, we do all that too. But it represents 3% of our joy and our trust and our love that we have with each other. And I know for me, the roots of it was based on feeling lonely and alone as a child because it always seemed like, well, gee, aren't we just going to be friendly to each other? Aren't we going to talk about, my gosh, are we going to die? Aren't we going to have that kind of dialogue? Isn't that important to you? Isn't that what family and friends do? And because that wasn't first nature in my family, friendship became the longing to have it feel more organic. And it's not that I didn't have a loving or caring family. It just was not a communicative family. And there wasn't that curiosity of, well, what's really going on in your experience right now? How do you like the world? Does school really make sense to you? And I know for me, school always seemed secondary to friendship. Get me to recess. Get me to after school. Let's go play sports together so we can hang out together. And then when we met, it was the ultimate fruition of the potential, because at 18, 19, 20, when I was really able to think for myself, it was really obvious that what was going on in our heart was central. What we really wanted to have happen in our lives wanted to be talked about. I wanted to be able to feed off of your intelligence and I wanted you to be able to feed off of mine.

I didn't mean to use the word religion, now that I'm thinking that friendship is your religion, because I'm also aware of how much I don't relate to traditional religion. So what is the difference? Is it a true religion? Is it the real religion? Is religion not part of this conversation?

I think real religion to me is looking for the truth and not being satisfied with beliefs, recognizing that we have beliefs, but it's just not enough. So the authentic experience that we're having is, maybe you'd call it sacred, maybe you'd call it the most important thing, but certainly not religion as we understand, because religion as we understand it, usually requires beliefs. So I love being able to reveal in the moment this is what I'm experiencing. And frequently it's a coexistence of both doubt and faith. And I frequently will look at my faith and say, well, I have doubt about my faith. And then I'll look at my doubt and say, I have doubt about my doubt. And so I'm not sure which is true. And that not sureness is really what I value. Now, if I could be sure about something, I'd be happy to have that too. So I would say that friendship is the easiest place to find in relationship, where we just get to be ourselves as we really are. So most of the time, friendship to us is rooted in having people that will validate the image that we have of ourselves, so they will be complimentary and flattering, or simply just do activities with us. However, the deeper capacity of friendship is to have people around us, or at least a few people around us, or at least one person around us that is going to actually be honest with us, and we are actually going to be honest with them, and we can develop the capacity to have it be the most authentic relationship possible. And this starts with a deep resolve inside you that you want to have a relationship, a friendship, where it is based on love of the truth. It's based on revealing what you know about yourself, being interested in what the other friend is going through, and then having a real dialogue where one of you is really listening and the other one is really revealing what's going on. And the implicit or explicit understanding is, I'm going to share the truth with you and be on your rooting team. And the basis for the relationship is truth and love and support. And when it's hard to share certain things, we're going to do it both about ourselves or about what we see in the other. Now, does this happen automatically? Does this happen just because we're friends? No, this happens because you get clear that you feel something isn't quite complete, something's a bit empty something's a bit superficial or removed and you have the resolve. I want to reveal virtually everything. Or a lot more. Or maybe even everything, if you're really one of the lucky ones. To your dearest friend.