What is friendship? How quick we are to use the word, yet how rare and precious its true meaning is. In Vedanta, friendship is seen as the highest form of the expression of human love. The true Vedanta teacher unfolds the teachings in the spirit of friendship. It could also be called agape love, which is most often crowned as the highest form of Christian love, but it has nothing to do with religion. It is nondual love in action that shows true empathy and extends the desire for the good of the beloved friend, who is seen and known to be the Self.
Many of us think true love comes only with passionate romantic love. Though this is not true, when it comes to our personal relationships, agape love is certainly not easy. Agape love means opening our hearts as wide as they will open, with nothing to hide or hold back. It requires paying attention to what the ‘other’ who is not other, truly needs. It is not about getting what we want, but giving what we are. Sometimes it means requiring us to act in the best interest of the other, extending grace and understanding, especially when it’s hardest to give. This love is very rare because most people do not feel good enough to receive it, let alone, give it.
If we have never experienced nondual love, and we are very lucky, we encounter someone with such powerful and generous light that they rekindle the obscured light within us, and return it magnified. Someone whose clear, steady gaze penetrates the very core of your being and, refusing to look away from even the most unloved parts of you, falls upon you like a benediction.
This is the gaze of the Self looking at itself, and in human terms, it is the gaze of true friendship, which is deeply personal and impersonal divine love. That we can bless each other in this way, yet it happens so rarely, is both a great miracle and a great tragedy, for there is no loneliness like the loneliness of having our light unknown and unseen, especially by ourselves.
The great Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue takes up this most intimate question in the opening pages of his book –To Bless The Space Between Us: A Book of Blessing, which celebrates “the gift that a blessing can be, the doors it can open, the healing and transfiguration it can bring” and invites us to “rediscover our power to bless one another.”
He is describing the Self without knowing, when he writes:
“There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself, though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as a blessing.”
The light of the Self is not shy, it is the all-seeing eye of the I, the most powerful non-thing in Existence, that which makes our existence possible. But what he is saying is that true friendship in the form of agape love offers the even greater blessing in our presence here together, as mirrors and magnifiers of each other’s true light, that of the nondual Self. “Whenever you give a blessing (of your true light, the Self, my insert), a blessing returns to enfold you,” O’Donohue reminds us. At their best, those moments of profound light-to-light (Self to Self) connection between us are thresholds, portals to transformation, invitations to a more radiant, beautiful life. How poor we are, without them.
Aristotle laid out the philosophical foundation of friendship as the art of holding up a mirror to each other’s souls. Two millennia later, Emerson contemplated friendships as two pillars of truth and tenderness. Another century later, C.S, Lewis wrote: “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
Even though O’Donohue did not have Self-knowledge, he is expressing the beauty, mystery, and soul-sustenance of friendship in his masterwork, Anan Cara: A book of Celtic Wisdom, titled after the Gaelic for “soul-friend”. Anam cara is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship that elegantly encapsulates what Aristotle and Emerson and Lewis articulated in many more words. In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an ‘anam cara’. It originally referred to someone to whom you confessed, revealing the hidden intimacies of your life. With the anam cara you could share your innermost self, your mind and your heart., without fear of judgement. We are all the teacher and the taught when it comes to true soul friendship.
True friendship is an act of recognition and belonging. When you have an anam cara, your friendship cuts across all convention, morality, space and time. You are joined in an ancient and eternal way that knows no boundaries or barriers. There are no limitations of time or space on or for the soul. The soul is the divine light that flows from you and into your Other – who is not other but YOU, the nondual Self. This art of belonging awakens and fosters the deepest companionship, the best there is, with no power struggles, no need to control, and gentle but fearless transparency. It is to surrender to the fierce tenderness of our own Being.
While passionate romantic/sexual love is a fire that burns hot and bright, without the depth of true friendship to sustain it, it just as easily burns out. The kind of friendship one finds in an anam cara is not the kind that pits the platonic against the romantic, but something that includes it, and is also, something much larger and more transcendent. It is love as the essence of life.
As O’Donohue says: ‘In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul, which is in fact, your own soul. “
Of course it is, because we are all the nondual Self.
This art of nondual love discloses the special and sacred identity of the other person to be exquisitely unique and also non-different simultaneously. Nondual Love is the only light that can truly read the secret signature and language of the other person’s individuality, as well as the common identity of their soul and yours. Nondual Love alone is unchanging in the world of origin, form and change; it alone can decipher identity and destiny within and beyond change.
Though nondual love is the true nature of all beings, and cannot actually be given to us by anyone, being anam cara, a soul friend, requires a powerful, purposeful presence. It is not easily or carelessly bestowed. It asks that we show up with absolute integrity of intention, that we always pay attention, not only when it suits us. That interior intentionality, O’Donohue suggests, is what sets the true anam cara apart from the acquaintance or casual friend. Though from the nondual perspective, everyone is our friend, this is a distinction all the more important today, in a culture where we throw the word “friend” around so easily, while it designates little more than perfunctory affiliation in a world terrified of true intimacy.
Perhaps because of the innate unworthiness most carry within them, or just sheer and shallow laziness, the faculty of showing up, of truly paying attention to those closest to us, which must be an active presence rather than a mere abstraction, is hard to give and more importantly, to maintain. The person who declares themselves a friend but shirks when the other’s soul most needs seeing is not an anam cara.
O’Donohue writes:
‘The heart learns a new art of feeling. Such friendship is neither cerebral nor abstract. In Celtic tradition, the anam cara was not merely a metaphor or ideal. It was a soul-bond that existed as a recognized and admired social construct. It altered the meaning of identity and perception. When your affection is kindled, the world of your intellect takes on a new tenderness and compassion. A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you. The one you love, your anam cara, your soul friend, is the truest mirror to reflect your soul. The honesty and clarity of true friendship also brings out the real contours of your spirit.’
The feeling this kind of love engenders is pure bliss, which is known to be you, something you can never lose. You look and see and understand differently. To those who are unsure of their worth or identity as the Self, this kind of powerful attention can seem dangerous, disruptive and awkward. But if allowed it gradually refines your sensibility and transforms your way of being in the world. Most fundamentalism, greed, violence, and oppression can be traced back to the separation of idea and affection – i.e., to the hypnosis of duality. In Vedanta, a true friend awakens and mirrors for you the essence of your soul – Existence, itself.
If you realize how vital to your existence, character, mind and health true friendship actually is, you will not only make time for it, but tend to it as one would tend the most precious garden. Sadly, for many of us, this kind of love is too much, way too risky. The prisons of isolation and limitation that the limited ego constructs do not allow the deepest form of love, our true nature, to flow in, or out. It’s the loneliest of humans who holds on desperately to limiting ideas that make them miserable, but that is the prison duality creates for all of us, until we break out of it with Self-knowledge.
If an anam cara shows up in your life, you have been blessed. Open the door.
With an eye to “that tenuous territory of change that we must traverse when a threshold invites us,” O’Donohue writes:
‘Without warning, thresholds can open directly before our feet, In the ecstasy and loneliness of one’s life, there are certain times when blessing is nearer to us. To step across the threshold with courage and open heartedness is to honour the truth and sanctity of our experience, of our light.’
It is to bless ourselves. The essence of all experience is the window into the divine – the nondual Self. When we are true to the essence of our deepest experience, we are true to God.
Isvara
ShiningWorld.com
