Spiritual Friends
by Zurmang Gharwang on Sunday, April 3, 2011 at 6:19am
We all like to have as many friends as possible and I personally, am not against such practice. Indeed, I do love my friends, which is in fact healthy and a pleasure. Friends are in fact helpful in a way, able to share or express our feelings, grievances and happiness.
To facilitate our needs, ingenious people came up with the wonderful tools such as telephones, e-mail, twitter, Facebook to keep in touch with each other. However, it is always wise to look for a friend who understands, respect each other and most importantly who knows sometime every friend needs their own space. In addition, such wise way will keep our friendship for a long time. Otherwise we may end up in court or displeasure. I may say "healthy living”. I have seen and heard many times friends fighting, quarrelling, and gossiping among themselves. Sometime, situation does occur, unexpectedly, when your friend who is dear to your heart becomes your worst nightmare. It is up to us how to improve our relationship to make it better and more meaningful .Coming back to the main discussion, on "Spiritual Friends" which is quite unique and it refers to your teacher or just a friend. The difference here is, the spiritual friends who assist us are mostly in spiritual matters or just help us in mundane issues. Furthermore, spiritual friend who always likes to dig out our hidden faults, because we can’t see our short comings. Such friends we should encourage and one should respect. Spiritual friends are like doctors, who are able to advise, diagnose and remove our sickness which we inherited for a long time, such as ignorance , hatred and attachment. As long as those poisons are within us, we don’t expect to be happy and satisfied because those poisons are the main problems. For instance, if you are afraid of snakes, can you sleep with the cobra snake and sleep comfortably? This is the simple reason why Buddha does not feel comfortable with those poisons. Do you feel comfortable? If yes, than you really need good spiritual friends!With love and best wishes