Authentic Friendliness – In Gita Verse 18.64 Because you are My very dear friend, I am speaking to you My supreme instruction, the most confidential knowledge of all. Hear this from Me, for it is for your benefit.
When Krishna is saying you are My very dear friend – he means that their relationship is real authentic friendliness.
We all have an innermost desire to have at least one friend like Krishna. But we don’t know what real, authentic friendliness is?
The question is very complex. You will have to understand a few other things before you can understand what real authentic friendliness is.
The first is friendship. Friendship is love without any biological tones to it. It is not the friendship that you understand ordinarily – the boyfriend, the girlfriend. To use the word friend in any way associated with biology is sheer stupidity. It is infatuation and madness. You are being used by biology for reproduction purposes.
Friendship is love without any biological tones. It has become a rare phenomenon. It used to be a great thing in the past, but a few great things in the past have completely disappeared. It is a very strange thing that ugly things are stubborn, they don’t die easily; and beautiful things are very fragile, they die and disappear very easily.
Today friendship is understood either in biological terms or in economic terms, or in sociological terms – in terms of acquaintance, a kind of acquaintance. But friendship means that if the need arises you will be ready even to sacrifice yourself. Friendship means that you have made somebody else more important than yourself; somebody else has become more precious than you yourself. It is not a business. It is love in its purity.
This friendship is possible even the way you are now. Even unconscious people can have such a friendship. But if you start becoming more conscious of your being, then friendship starts turning into friendliness. Friendliness has a wider connotation, a far bigger sky.
Friendship is a small thing compared to friendliness. Friendship can be broken, the friend can turn into an enemy. That possibility remains intrinsic in the very fact of friendship.
Friendliness becomes possible only when you are real, you are authentic, and you are absolutely aware of your being. And out of this awareness, if love arises it will be friendliness. Friendliness can never change into its opposite. Remember this as a criterion, that the greatest values of life are only those which cannot change into their opposite; in fact there is no opposite.
“What is real authentic friendliness?”
It will need a great transformation in you to have a taste of friendliness. As you are, friendliness is a faraway star. You can have a look at the faraway star, you can have a certain intellectual understanding, but it will remain only an intellectual understanding, not an existential taste.
Unless you have an existential taste of friendliness, it will be very difficult, almost impossible to make a distinction between friendship and friendliness. Friendliness is the purest thing you can conceive about love. It is so pure that you cannot even call it a flower, you can only call it a fragrance which you can feel and experience, but you cannot catch hold of. It is there, your nostrils are full of it, your being is surrounded by it. You feel the vibe, but there is no way to catch hold of it; the experience is so big and so vast and our hands are too small.
Question is very complex, not because of the question, but because of you. You are not yet at the point from where friendliness can become an experience. Be real, be authentic and you will know the purest quality of love – just a fragrance of love surrounding you always. And that quality of the purest love is friendliness. Friendship is addressed to someone, somebody is your friend.
Once Gautam Buddha was asked, “Does the enlightened man have friends?” and he said, “No.” The questioner was shocked because he was thinking the man who is enlightened must have the whole world as his friend.
But Gautam Buddha is right, whether you are shocked or not. When he says, “The enlightened man has no friends,” he is saying he cannot have friends because he cannot have enemies. They both come together. Friendliness he can have, but not friendship.
Friendliness is unfocused, unaddressed love. It is not any contract, spoken or unspoken. It is not from one individual to another individual; it is from one individual to the whole existence, of which man is only a small part, because trees are included, animals are included, rivers are included, mountains are included, stars are included. Everything is included in friendliness.
Friendliness is just the way of your being real and authentic; you start radiating it. It comes on its own accord, you don’t have to bring it. Whoever comes close to you will feel the friendliness.
That does not mean that nobody will be your enemy. As far as you are concerned, you will not be an enemy of anyone, because you are no longer a friend to anyone. But your height, your consciousness, your blissfulness, your silence, your peace will annoy many, will irritate many, will make many, without understanding you, your enemies.
In fact the enlightened men have more enemies than the unenlightened. The unenlightened may have a few enemies, a few friends. The enlightened men have almost the whole world antagonistic towards them, because the blind people cannot forgive the man who has eyes, and the ignorant cannot forgive one who knows. They cannot feel love towards a man who has attained to his fulfillment, because their egos are hurt.
The enlightened man has no friends, no enemies, but only a pure love, unaddressed. He is ready to pour into anybody’s heart who is available. That is real authentic friendliness.
Krishna in this friendliness was ready to give Arjuna most confidential knowledge. What is the difference between Arjuna and us? For Krishna there is no difference. Arjuna is ready to receive his un-adress love and we are not ready. That’s the only difference. Arjuna is Authentic and real, we are not.
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