We might have memories (from the ‘I’, memories are born…AND from memory the ‘I’ is born, thrives and creates the illusion of a future) of taking care of hepatitis ridden women; long conversations; listening and empathizing to the stories that were the source of suffering; dropping what was being done to attend to others needs; driving for hours to the doctor and spending nights as they recover from their various maladies; comforting them in their dark hours; words spoken in ‘innocence’ misconstrued as mean and hurtful (not that we might never have intentionally uttered hurtful words!); and generally being on the ‘black’ lists for being either “know it all(s)”, “selfish”, “thinking (ourselves) superior”, being inattentive, and/or just darn-right irritating.
Apparently, we are seen as no friend…because we don’t fit a description. From the list of complaints, we might imagine that to be a good friend, we are supposed to be the opposite of the things listed above, i.e. selfless, a know-a-little, know nothing, (or if we DO know something we should keep it to ourselves); think (or act as if) we are inferior, or to be always mindful that all are equal; be ever attentive, and not be so darned irritating. Sheesh!
Given this trend of thought we might continue the pitiful saga of ‘friend/not friend’ by feeling misunderstood. “How come we are not seen as we are?” we might wonder. Or we might rationalize that what they see in us has more to do with them and how they see themselves and the world than with us. We might think to ourselves that if they are truly our friends they're supposed to see through all of their stories about us and themselves, and acknowledge the well meaning people we really are. Absurd, isn’t it.
The clincher (if we care to look further into the absurdity) is this: How we see them is of much greater importance than how we think they see us, (although the two are not really different) not because it tells us something about them, but rather what can be revealed about ourselves. It can show us how we are ‘seeing’ them via the image we have of ourselves (bad AND good).
What we see when we look outward is our own reflection. What we don’t like ‘out there’ is what we don’t accept about ourselves. What we love in you, we may miss in ourselves…because we’re seeing it as existing ‘out there’. This is the way of it when our focus is on the world.
The hopeless task of convincing ‘others’ that we are okay…that even in our worst moments we are innocent will lose its steam though inquiry. There is no innocence in illusion. Neither is there evil. The only evil is the ignorance of believing the illusion to be true.
So these friends who do not count us among their friends are good friends to us. They are the ones who show us where we fail to love ourselves; what characteristics we have yet to embrace as beautiful, necessary fragments of the ONE. They are in fact our BEST buddies. They are not separate from us. They are the innocents waiting to be recognized as such.
