Finding the Friend
Thursday, August 25th, 2005Sometime in my late teens, I wrote a poem that started like this:
If I found you, my Friend,
I would open my mouth
and inside you would find
only a feather
with no tongue
and nothing to say.
Even though I had many friends, I was terribly lonely. No particular friend seemed to meet me in the place where my real life was unfolding. I felt a tremendous longing for a kind of encounter with another that would be as infinite as I knew the world to be.
In the poem, the feather expressed my longing for the non-ordinary, for infinity, for play, for magic. The feather was my “real” tongue, the one that spoke in ways I felt no one in my life could hear. My ordinary tongue, the one that everyone understood, had nothing to say, nothing of any importance to me, at least.
After I encountered Tantra and began exploring spirituality, I realized that many spiritual traditions speak of the Friend.
The Sufi master Rumi writes:
Talking is pain. Lie down and rest,
now that you’ve found a Friend to be with.
The Friend is not the answer to some adolescent dream of being in love. The Friend is not the person who will feed all of your fixations and anesthetize you with a semblance of ordinary happiness.
The Friend is Siva, the one in whom you can rest and the one who calls you to freedom. The Friend is the Host and the Mirror. As the Host, the Friend is always larger than you are, able to encompass and hold everything that you are. As Host, the Friend calls you to profound relaxation. As the Mirror, the Friend reflects you to yourself, because the Friend is none other than your larger self. As the Mirror, the Friend can be deeply disturbing and threatening.
Rumi’s friend was the wandering crazy wisdom Guru Shams of Tabriz. Rumi often feels shattered by his encounters with Shams as Shams tears down his disciple’s boundaries and attachments. Rumi just as often expresses the unutterable sweetness of being in Shams’ presence, in the presence of one who knows him, always knows him, better than he knows himself. And he recognizes Shams as one who loves him with the steadfastness and abandon of an entire cosmos in love with itself, in love with its own boundless creativity.
Others have many things and people they love.
This is not the way of Friend and friend.
The Guru is often our primary means of encountering the Friend. The devotion and gratitude we feel when we encounter a true Guru is not only toward that person as the one who arrives to deliver us to our larger Self. We feel gratitude and devotion toward the entire cosmos because it has created the meeting of the two who are one in a form that can be recognized and lived by us. If, through your relationship with your teacher, you are not naturally coming to relate yourself with devotion to the entire world, then that is a symptom of limitation.
As the Tantric poet Jnanadeva says, Shiva-Shakti manifests itself as the Guru and disciple when it wants to experience natural devotion in human form.
Devotion is the natural form of the Friend and the friend, and this is the true glory of the human realm. Devotion expressed through the medium of the Friend and the friend is devotion for the entire world. This is what we learn through the Guru-disciple relationship and through other aspects of our sadhana such as deity yoga.
Every true Guru, and every Mahadeva, is a royal road to realizing that we are always accompanied and hosted by the Friend.
O friend, fly toward the Friend.
OM Shanti, Shambhavi
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